Today at Brown

When he was in graduate school, Christian Franck initially focused on aerospace engineering. Today, there is far more to the story. Though airplanes remain a passion, Franck has expanded his academic interests into tissue engineering. Rather than build a better plane, Franck now wants to figure out how to construct a better cell.

“I realized that we can use the exact same principles we use to build planes to build tissue,” said Franck, 30. To him, cells may be the best machines of all, despite some remaining mysteries about how they operate.

Despite — or maybe because of — those mysteries, he sees the cell as the ultimate micromachine.

“It’s better than any machine that people up to now can even fathom,” Franck said. “But we still have lots to learn about how cells work.”

That is what Franck, a native of Germany, will focus on this fall in his new role as assistant professor of engineering. He hopes to better understand how cells interact with their surrounding tissue. Franck also wants to help advance the field of tissue engineering, enabling the construction of better tissue that can be used for vascular and other transplants.

Some vascular tissue construction already takes place, he said. But scientists haven’t yet perfected the building of tissue in the lab that perfectly mimics what it is designed to replace. The reason, Franck said, is that scientists in the past haven’t necessarily considered the importance of mechanics — the notion of perfectly matching the mechanical properties of tissue created in the lab to the areas in which it is being implanted.

“I want to use all the mechanical tools we have to understand the properties of native tissues we have, and use that knowledge to develop artificial tissues that mimic native tissue in every possible way,” he said.

That science doesn’t just apply to vascular grafts. Franck sees tissue reconstruction as being crucial someday to treating spinal cord injuries, where doctors could someday grow nerves and other tissue to restore movement and vitality.

Collaboration for Franck will be crucial, and he envisions working with colleagues who specialize in both biology and medicine. The notion of working across disciplines is one of the things that attracted him to Brown.

“You have a lot of exchange of new ideas and it is very easy to work with people in a discipline,” he said. “That is very important to my work.”

Franck’s background is already diverse. He earned his Ph.D. in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology in 2008. His thesis did not focus on airplanes: “The Quantitative Characterization of 3-D Deformations of Cell Interactions with Soft Biomaterials.” He finished a postdoctoral program at Harvard University before coming to Brown.

Franck isn’t all research, though. He earned his pilot’s license while in graduate school and can fly single-engine two or four-seater planes. He is also an avid hiker and bike rider.

Franck reveals something else: He’s played guitar for nearly 15 years and owns three guitars — two acoustic and one electric. Recently, he also began playing in a small band with Janet Blume, a fellow faculty member in the Division of Engineering who just happens to play drums. Kipp Bradford, also of the engineering faculty, and Shawn Kitchner, a Brown alum, complete the band, which now also has a name.

“We are called Green's Theorem,” Franck says. “We are a true Brown engineering band.”